What I like about
this quote from Twain is that it suggests a model of the book as a palimpsest
– as a collapsing of what is written, what has been left out, and what can
never be said.And it recognizes the
latent multiplicity of a text – the way in which letting loose those
suppressed versions, those restrictive choices would necessitate a library to
house the textual proliferation that would ensue.That’s precisely what we’re doing here, I
would argue.We’re providing a digital
library to enable just that kind of fascinating proliferation at the level of
the text and of its critical apparatus.We hope researchers will find it indispensible … we suspect Mark Twain
would approve.